Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet

by Paul Knepper

The biography of legend Moses Malone, the first modern-day player to jump from high school basketball to the pros, paving a path for future star players like Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and LeBron James to follow.
 

Genres: Basketball, Sports

304 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2025

About the author

Paul Knepper was a New York Knicks featured columnist for Bleacher Report. His first book was The Knicks of the Nineties: Ewing, Oakley, Starks, and the Brawlers That Almost Won It All, and his second book is Moses Malone: The Life of a Basketball Prophet. Knepper grew up in Jericho, New York, and now lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and son. He's a graduate of the University of Michigan and Fordham University School of Law.

Reviews

[Lance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fairly or unfairly, the public perception of a superstar athlete will often be evaluated on his or her relationship with the media. Hall of Fame basketball player Moses Malone was a player who may not have had the popularity of others in his era like Magic Johnson or Michael Jordan, but that didn’t stop him from having a great basketball career and show his true side to teammates and others out of the spotlight. That trait of Malone’s, as well as his success on the court, is documented in this excellent biography by Paul Knepper.


Malone became famous at a young age when he became the first high school player to be drafted and signed by a professional team in 1974. After a brilliant high school career in Petersburg, Virginia, Malone was ready to play college ball at the University of Maryland, he instead signed with the Utah Stars of the American Basketball Association (ABA). The poverty he experienced due to being raised in a fairly large family led by a single mother certainly played a role in the decision. Knepper’s research and interviews help the reader learn about this period of Malone’s life.


The pages about Malone’s professional basketball career are just as good. The ABA and its teams were on shaky financial ground and the Stars eventually folded and Malone joined the Spirits of St. Louis. While he was a young and raw talent playing for these teams, he impressed coaches and veteran teammates with his work ethic and willingness to listen to coaches. This bode well for him after the ABA and NBA merged. Because the Spirits were not one of the 4 teams to enter the NBA, Malone was put in a dispersal draft, where he was selected by the Portland Trail Blazers and soon thereafter dealt to the Buffalo Braves. After some time in Buffalo, Malone was traded again, this time to the Houston Rockets.


It was in Houston where Malone was finally able to show the talent, skill and smarts on the court that made him a Hall of Fame player. He led the Rockets to the NBA Finals once and made several all star teams. However, after not receiving an offer he saw as fitting for what he did in Houston, he signed with the Philadelphia 76ers. That team was already loaded with stars like Julius Erving, Bobby Jones, and Maurice Cheeks. The 76ers, having lost twice in the Finals to the Lakers in the previous three seasons, finally won it all in 1983. Malone made a famous quote of “Fo, fo, fo” meaning the Sixers would win the three series needed to become champions in four game sweeps - he was only one game off.


During this time with the Sixers is when the reader, thanks to Knepper’s excellent writing, learns the complicated person Malone is. He is generous with his time to teammates and fans, but not always with the press. He can seem charming but infidelity and allegations of hitting his wife brings down that image. After his skills were declining, he struggled to find a career after basketball although he did not blow all his money away. All in all, this book is an excellent look at the complex life of one of the best basketball players of the 1980’s.


I wish to thank University of Nebraska Press for providing a copy of the book via NetGalley. The opinions expressed in this review are strictly my own.

https://sportsbookguy.blogspot.com/20...

[Mark Lieberman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this from Netgalley, so I can read and review it before it’s published. Before I dive in, I was a huge basketball fan (mainly San Antonio Spurs, but also the league in general). So, when I saw this biography of Moses, I was all in and extremely intrigued. I knew a little about his life, but was looking forward to reading a lot more. Let me tell you, after I read a few chapters, I was already thinking this could very easily be the book of the year for me.

Moses was the first player to go from High School to a professional team, and that professional team was the Utah Stars in the ABA. He was recruited by the University of Maryland and did sign a letter to attend, but money talks, and Moses needed the financial stability so he could support his family. The overall college recruitment process was talked about, and a lot of them offered more than a scholarship to Moses.

Looking back at all the teams and coaches he played for, it’s very impressive…

After Utah, he went on to play for the Spirits of St. Louis in the ABA, the Buffalo Braves, the Houston Rockets (Rudy Tomjanovich was a teammate and he mentored and helped Hakeem Olajuwon while he playing for the University of Houston – he become a superstar in the NBA years later, the Philadelphia 76ers (his teammates were Dr. J., Bobby Jones, Maurice Cheeks, and Charles Barkley – just to name a few key ones), the Washington Bullets (7’7 Manute Bol and 5’3 Muggsy Bogues were teammates), the Atlanta Hawks (Dominique Wilkins and Doc Rivers were teammates), and he finished is storied career as a member of the 1994-1995 San Antonio Spurs (David Robinson and Dennis Rodman were teammates).

Some of his highlighted accomplishments include:

1983 NBA Champion
1983 NBA Finals MVP
3x NBA MVP
13x All-Star

A lot of game details were included throughout the book. His sense of humor was tongue-in-cheek and his media personality was boring – on purpose. He had a knack for the game itself and prided himself on being prepared and never taking anything for granted. If he took interest in you, you would be set for life inside the courts and also outside the courts.

Overall, I really enjoyed all the stories of Moses from his childhood to retirement to the NBA Hall of Fame where he was inducted in 2001.

[Jeff Wait · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well-researched and engaging. Moses is one of the greats most often forgot, and I hope this book helps people remember him. He was a complicated character -- shy around strangers and the press, gentle and jovial around his teammates and friends. The book does not shy away from his marital transgressions, but it also doesn't let them overshadow what was overall a very impressive life. Ultimately, this is a story about hard work. I enjoyed it.

[Diane Wilkes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn't know much about basketball when I unintentionally got ensnared into the Sixers run for the title in 1983. I had only watched one other professional game a few years before, and was awed by Wilt Chamberlain's dominance. Instinctively, I was drawn to truly great players--I was supposed to be rooting for the Knicks, but the power Wilt radiated stole my fascination. (Only for that game--I was not raised in a family that watched sports of any kind.)

But that Sixers team also quietly and quickly drew my attention. Doc, so graceful. Mo so fast and Andrew Toney so deadly, like a surgeon with flashy moves. Bobby Jones, the only White player I ever saw who was graceful and relentless and seemingly effortless.

And Moses Malone. So physical but never cheap or dirty. He just kept coming. He was inexorable as the dawn. I ended up getting tickets for all the remaining Philly games, one against the Bucks. Two against the Lakers. I actually had tickets for game five against the Lakers, but . . . there was no game five. We whipped them in four and I went to the parade with friends, wearing my number 24 t-shirt.

Lately, I've been thinking about those memories and when I read a new, serious biography of Moses Malone was being published, I downloaded a sample, then the whole book. Because Moses was always an enigma, always extremely succinct (Fo, fo, fo!) and reporter-avoidant. He did his talking in the paint. But he was the man who took us the Promised Land, even as he always repeated it was Doc's team.

I thought I knew who he was. He was painfully shy and hard to understand, due to a stutter and a thick accent (and a disability, which I didn't know). He also looked down when he talked, so I couldn't even attempt to read his lips. I assumed (correctly) he grew up in poverty and didn't get a great education; he went straight to the pros from high school. I was new to basketball, so I didn't know the history of the ABA, though of course later on I read a lot about it. (BTW, if you can watch the wonderful documentary on the ABA on Amazon, I highly recommend it. So much Doc on the doc!)

Knepper has really done his homework and research and delivered an eye-opening book about the greatest offensive rebounder who ever played professional basketball. Petersburg, VA, where Moses was born and grew up, has now been taken over by drugs and crime, but when he was growing up, it was simply a poverty-drenched town once the largest factory shut down. Raised by his protective, hard-working mom, Moses was skinny, but once he fell for basketball, he worked harder than everyone else (a theme in his life) and became so great that as a high school player, hundreds of coaches and recruiters moved to Petersburg to try and convince him to sign with their school.

Unlike today, there were no trainers or nutrition coaches for young Moses. There was simply hard work, and no one was more coachable or hard-working or determined to go pro than Moses Malone. What is remarkable is how professionals, coaches and players, all talk about this aspect of Moses, and it's not like their expectations or experience are small-scale when it comes to practice. Every professional basketball player works hard, even AI (I read his memoir recently, so I know.) But Moses took it up another five gears or so.

Despite his being hard to understand and limited verbal communication in the press, it turns out that Moses was super-smart about the things that mattered to him. Like money. He wasn't a cheap player, but despite his wealth, he was quite tight-fisted not just in his early years in the pros, when poverty was a recent companion, but in later life. He'd cadge free meals whenever he could and went to inexpensive restaurants to save money, although it also fit in his mentality of not acting like a superstar. He was very humble and never treated anyone with arrogance, even rookies who were used to such behavior.

Knepper didn't write a puff piece; there are hard things to read about the way Moses treated his wife, Alfreda. He loved her, but abused her and cheated on her from the very beginning of their marriage.

It was difficult for Moses to accept the way age ravaged his skills and ability to play and the most coachable superstar in basketball became angry and bitter in the end of his career. By the time he retired, he was a ghost of his old, dominant self. It made me very sad reading this part of the book.

The title, referring to Moses as a Basketball Prophet, has two-fold meaning. There is a famous poster of Moses in a desert, surrounded by basketballs, a play on the other Moses leading his people to the promised land. But he also used to sit in the locker room after practice and games and tell every player what he was doing wrong very specifically, the essence of constructive criticism. He was a savant when it came to basketball, partly due to inner genius but, yes, again, also his constant practice and thought about the game. Even in the off-season, he never took time off, but played in local basketball courts while his teammates took it easy. He was consumed by basketball, and like James Brown, the hardest working man in the business.

[Will Godwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moses Malone —The Life of a Basketball Prophet was released on this Dia de los Muertos. The publisher, the University of Nebraska Press, has appropriately revived the legacy of this legendary basketball player and individual whose story should be remembered in the history of basketball. The author Paul Knepper’s deep research and well-crafted storytelling paints the portrait of the man who deeply loved the game and whose deep desire to play it and be in community with its people and places led him to be a pioneer and Hall of Fame achiever in the sport. To quote the author’s last sentence in his Introduction, “For a five-year period when icons named Kareem, Dr. J, Magic, and Bird graced the hardwood, Moses Malone was the greatest basketball player in the world.” Paul Knepper has captured and capsulized the spirit of Moses Malone in this post-mortem biography. Kudos to him and the University of Nebraska for this contribution to securing his legacy.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paul is a wonderful presence on X and this long awaited book was excellent. Exactly what you want in a sports bio, a perfect mix of knowing the man as well as the athlete.